


Entanglement

by Basic_instinct40



Category: The Magicians (TV), The Magicians - Lev Grossman
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2019-05-20
Packaged: 2020-03-08 16:08:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18898066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Basic_instinct40/pseuds/Basic_instinct40
Summary: Late entry into the Welters challenge for the theme: Destiny. I thought about quantum entanglement, how Jane Chatwin's spell would alter the group and they're bond over  time. For everyone who loves different time loops and all the ways the group has collided.





	Entanglement

_**Will it work this time?** _  
_**The wave function collapses.** _  
_**Single once again.** _  
_**\- Anonymous** _

Henry Fogg was worried, and when he worried he drank, which was why he was now in his office at two in the afternoon, drunk-as-a-skunk, while Jane fucking Chatwin told him her plan to rewind time. He drank deeply from his tumbler hoping to squash down the sickening anxiety that rolled in his gut.

Jane wasn't worried. If anything, she was elated. Henry wasn't sure if he had ever seen this particular mood from the woman. She babbled on and on while sitting on his desk about how that Quentin boy and his little friends nearly got Martin. Closer than anyone to have done such a feat.

“Fillory wants to open the door for him, Henry,” she exclaimed. “I can feel it. He reminds me of someone you know,” she said, her head tilted to the side deep in thought. “I have the watch. I can reset him and the others. Give them a fighting chance now that we know.”

Henry laughed incredulously into his drink. “And what is it exactly that we know now, Jane? That Alice Quinn is a disturbed young woman who manipulated a fool into opening a door wide enough for the Beast to just stroll right into my damn school?” He slammed his drink down to punctuate his sentence causing Jane to jump.

“Really, Henry, there's no need for theatrics,” Jane said getting up from the desk, smoothing out her skirt of not quite there wrinkles. “This is the exact reason the dwarves sent me on my quest to gain knowledge on using the watch.” At this, she pulled the gold pocket watch out of thin air.

“Time magic isn't something to idly fool with,” he warned her. “It’s a field that hardly anyone knows about. The repercussions it could have in their minds, their souls --” Jane cut him off with a motion from her hand and a dismissive laugh. “You know, Henry, you’re usually more fun when you drink,” she said with a wiggle of her eyebrows. “We have a chance to save Fillory and finally put a stop to all of this madness.”

Henry tried to protest again, but Jane shook her head, reaching into her blouse to display a thin gold chain with a key on it. Henry could tell that it was something ancient and powerful. The Knowledge student in him wanted to reach out and touch it, but the feral part of his brain told him that this was also an object to fear. It made Henry worried. He slowly got up, the scotch coursing through his veins making him braver than he ought to have been. Jane was a formidable woman and he knew making her upset was risky, but they had been his students for better or worse. They had been his responsibility.

He walked up to her and put his hand on hers, the one holding the watch. Jane quirked an eyebrow at him as if to ask, “What is it?”

“For all of our sakes I hope this plan of yours works. I was very fond of one of the students.” He told her firmly, thinking of Julia Wicker’s torn body lying in ruins with the others.

Jane wretched her hand out of his and gave him a wide smile. “Don't worry, Henry, this time we’ll get it right. You’ll see.”

  
_**"In quantum physics, entangled particles remain connected so that actions performed on one affect the other, even when separated by great distances."** _

Ten times now Henry had watched his students die. Ten times he had greeted them as they passed their test to be accepted into Brakebills. First Eliot and Margo, the farmer boy from Indiana who was looking to be something else other than his family’s disappointment, and the pretty, rich girl who surprised everyone with her brains. Henry noticed; they always found each other. He doubted that their natural connection had anything to do with Jane’s endless time loops. If anything, it only seemed to make their bond stronger as he had tried to explain to her countless of times.

He did what he could to make them stronger, noticing Margo’s natural leadership skills and the ease in which she could pull Eliot out of a drunken stupor. Eliot, he realized, never truly came into his own until Quentin showed up the next year. Something about the floppy haired man-child pulled the older student up to his full potential. Henry knew that Jane couldn't understand the relationship that always formed between the two young men, whether it was a timeline where the two were romantic or not, Jane would always waste precious time pushing the tortured Alice Quinn with Quentin. He knew the tragic history of her other brother Rupert, and always suspected that she fought so hard against Eliot and Quentin’s genuine chemistry for that reason. It was one of the reasons he sent Eliot to greet Quentin. His little joke against Jane’s hetero narrative for her male lead.

All jokes aside, Henry was growing tired of Jane’s failures. When he agreed to her plan, he never thought that they would reach double digits, but here he was for a tenth time, with no end in sight. Jane had started experimenting with the timelines -- “little tweaks,” she called them. Her latest one was involving the traveler Penny, and her attempt to push him with Margo Hanson. An extremely laughable attempt, in his opinion, because other than the brief timeline where Penny and Quentin were an item (Henry was still puzzled by that), Mr. Adiyodi only had eyes for Julia. In seven out of ten timelines, the traveler had fallen in love with Henry's young protege and he doubted it was simply coincidence.

“God, Henry, you act as if they're soulmates,” Jane had shouted at him when he told her his reservations about pairing Penny off with others. “As if they're destined to be together,” she continued. “Julia needs to be tougher, faster. Penny gets in the way of that, making moon eyes at her, when she could be learning skills, but we need our traveler to bond with the group so he doesn’t just leave them high and dry, so let’s pair him with Margo who, quite frankly, could use the --”

“I’ll stop you right there, Jane,” Henry said, his voice tired under her excessive ranting. “I don’t know much in the way of destiny,” he spoke candidly, “but I do know that your time meddling is making it harder for their actions to be less predictable. Penny being with Margo will only cause discourse among the group and you know it.” He ended the sentence by jabbing his index finger toward her face.

“Besides,” he sighed, “Margo is much better suited with Alice. We’ve seen proof. In the third timeline they almost...”

Jane cut him off with a loud “Ha!”, rounding on him so fast he took several steps back. “In that godforsaken loop Alice niffin’d herself attempting the Rhinemann Ultra! A spell that, if memory serves, Margo convinced her to try!” Jane breathed heavy under the weight of the failed loop. “Then Margo got them all killed when she was driven mad with grief and tried to take on Martin on her own.”

Henry remained quiet at her retelling of events, knowing that trying to make Jane see the reason Margo had been right to convince Alice to do the spell would be an impossible errand. Alice was a strong magician. He had bias for Julia, of course, and he knew Jane favored her too, probably seeing something of herself in the woman, but while Julia was drawn to magic, pure and simply, he knew the young blonde had untapped raw potential. Some people just radiated with power. Margo Hanson could see that in Alice, and unlike others, she wasn't afraid by it or envious. On the contrary, she pushed Alice out of her meek facade and made her face what she could actually become.

_**“Certain objects can become linked by a mysterious process called entanglement. Particles that become entangled are deeply connected regardless of the distance between them. If they become separated by the width of the Universe, the bond between them remains intact. These particles are so deeply linked that its as if they somehow share the same existence.”** _

In timeline thirteen Eliot lies next to Quentin, feeling raw and endless. He knows that they are on borrowed time -- that any time with Quentin in this intimate space has a cost. Tomorrow they would go to Fillory; they would face the Beast no matter what the end result. Quentin pulls him closer, his arm wrapping around Eliot’s sore hip bone, already half-asleep as usual. Eliot wants to sleep -- to slip into the comfortable abyss and have this be his last moment, but instead he is awake, feeling more alert than ever. His skin aches for booze and drugs, even though Quentin had asked him -- rather pleaded with him -- to stop. Eliot could stop the action of putting the poison in his bloodstream, but he could no more dismiss the want for the hallucinogens than the want he had for Quentin. Tomorrow was not the day to be hungover, though. Tomorrow and all of his tomorrows were promised to Quentin, and for that reason alone, Eliot would remain cold-sober.

The journey to this place: this bed, naked and warm with Q, had been a long time coming. Eliot feels like he had been born to collide with the younger man, all the time before being just that: the before. Eliot had fought small-town homophobes, Alice Quinn, and his own fears to get to where he was now, and he would fight The Beast with every ounce of his being to keep it. Who he was with Quentin was every bit of the man that he wanted to keep being.

The aforementioned younger man rambled something too quiet for Eliot to make out. His soft breath ghosting against his shoulder, causing a shiver down Eliot’s spine. He wraps his long arm across the Q and kissed his forehead, soothing the worried creases that appeared even in his sleep. “Hush,” he gently ordered of him. Everything was going to be alright he assured himself as he drifted off to sleep. They would defeat The Beast and come back home. He could feel it in his soul. It was destiny.

  
_**"In practice, entanglement is an extremely delicate condition. Background disturbances readily destroy the state — a bane for quantum computing in particular, because calculations are done only as long as the entanglement lasts. But for the first time, we discover suggestions that memories of entanglement can survive its destruction."** _

Julia knows it’s wrong to be here so soon after the fight, but she can’t help herself. She’s drawn to the curly-haired woman who barely shows up for class and knows all the right things to say to make Julia laugh. Kady Orloff Diaz wasn't the type of person that she would have hung out with before coming to Brakebills. She wouldn't have been welcome in the type of social circles that Julia frequented, but none of those things mattered now.

She had broken up with Penny just hours ago, but she wasn't thinking of that now. Now all she could think of was the way Kady’s hypnotic green eyes danced over her face and breast. Julia had made sure to wear a lowcut shirt. Penny had been too controlling since The Beast had set his sights on Quentin, and therefore her. Penny had been keeping track of her whereabouts, and she understood that he loved her, but to attempt to travel her away until the fighting was over made her furious to think about. Q was counting on her -- hell, Fillory, the place she had spent her childhood dreaming of, was counting on her. Penny didn't know her at all if he thought he could keep her away. They had stood in front of her parents house where he had taken her under the guise of finally wanting to meet her sister. Penny with a jawline that could cut glass was thinking of himself as heroic, but Julia was the same as she had always had been; the one that had chased Quentin’s childhood bullies away. Penny didn't know her at all if he thought she was ready to relinquish that job. As far as she was concerned The Beast was just another pig-headed bully who thought he could pick on Julia Wicker’s best friend, and he would learn his lesson same as the ones who came before. She screamed herself almost hoarse until Penny took her back to Brakebills.

And now here she was on the eve of battle, a tequila-laden Solo cup in hand, and a belly full of the same, and she didn't think of Penny and his sorrow-filled eyes as she broke his heart, or of her oldest friend who was hopefully off getting laid by his tall, curly-haired lover. No, the only thing that was on her mind was Kady’s lips and the promise of an alleged hip tattoo that she said she wasn't drunk enough to show her. Sitting in the Physical Kids Cottage, newly single, and thanks to the tequila, feeling more daring, Julia wanted to cash in on that promise.

“You want another?”, Kady asked her, standing up to refill her cup. “Sure,” Julia answered grabbing on to Kady’s slim wrist and pulling her down gently but firm to capture her mouth in a kiss. It was different than kissing Penny, which she was happy to find. Kissing Penny was a wonder onto itself, but it was bit like knowing an answer to a question. Satisfying, but not challenging. With her lips against Kady’s, who had now bent down fully to receive Julia’s mouth, it felt like finding out a unknown unknown. A question that she didn't even know she wasn't aware of, but was pleased to know more.

Kady pulled away just as the kiss started to deepen, much to Julia’s displeasure. She put her fingers against her now swollen lips wanting to memorize every new sensation as Kady walked towards the bar, her hands in her hair. A silence fell on them that was neither comfortable or uncomfortable, it just was and Julia found herself in a state that she normally wasn’t: unsure. She didn't want to upset Kady, but she had to know if she felt the same way.

Julia got up from her chair and walked up to the other woman, her head bowed, ready to apologize. She put a hand out to touch her hair, craving the softness of the curls. Kady leaned into the caress, a moan escaping her lips. Julia took that as a good sign and wrapped her arms around the taller woman's waist, pressing her face into Kady’s warm back. They stood like this for a encapsulating moment of time, feeling like the last two people on earth, before Kady turned around drawing Julia’s hips to her’s.

“Are you sure?,” Kady asked her, looking deeply into the shorter woman's eyes.

Julia answered her with heated kiss putting all her emotion behind the physical connection. The kiss said, “More than anything.” The second kiss said, “Again.”

_**"When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representation, enter into a temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described as before, viz., by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics". - Erwin Schrödinger** _

As it had been all the other twenty-seven times Quentin laid amongst his friends dying slowly and horribly, The Beast had saved him for last, toying with him while he cut down the group one by one. Quentin thought about how they had all been so confident in their plan just that morning as he coughed up blood. The Beast had just been too powerful.

He attacked Penny first, ripping off his hands at the wrist with brute strength. Quentin knew they were doomed, not because of the way Penny screamed, but because of the animalistic howls Julia gave when she went after the Beast in retaliation, throwing their well-laid plan to the wind. After that, it was all pretty much chaos. Quentin knew that Julia was able to wound The Beast, but not bad enough and not before he broke her neck. Margo had been trying to offer defense along with Quentin and Eliot, but the sight of a dead Julia, her longtime rival and frenemy, pushed her past no return. It hadn’t surprised anyone who knew Margo that she had decided to bring a gun to Fillory, but it had definitely given The Beast a shock when she had used the last act of her life to shoot him twice in chest.

Quentin chuckled faintly at the memory. He could tell now that he wouldn't have long, but that could still mean hours. Now that he knew about the time loops, and about their other lives, this process of dying felt familiar. Watching the people he loved more than magic die, and the hot rage that came with it felt familiar. Fucking Chatwins. Who knew that the children that had saved him over and over again during his darkest times would turn out to be his killers? Martin had killed Alice when she stepped in front of him and Eliot. Or rather when they had both stepped in front of Quentin as he pushed against their bodies shouting at them till he could taste blood. He and Eliot had been fighting when they got to Fillory. Fighting over Alice and his attraction to her. He loved Eliot, would always love Eliot, but something pulled him to Alice all the same. They had all ended up in bed together after the first night training with the emotion bottles and ever since then Eliot refused to be in a room alone with the two of them unless he was drunk.

None of that mattered now, seeing as they were both dead, lying on either side of Quentin who would soon be dead as well. The cluttered confused emotions of his love life now seemed mundane in comparison to his impending death. He wished he had told them both that he had loved them, and that he was just lucky to breathe the same air as them. He wished for another chance. Quentin heard footsteps that broke him out of his thoughts, and he wondered if it was The Beast coming back to finish him off when he recognized the pale green eyes looking down at him with disappointment.

“Once more then?,” Jane asked in a neutral voice.

_**"It is also possible to create entanglement between quantum systems that never directly interacted, through the use of entanglement swapping. Two independently-prepared, identical particles may also be entangled if their wave functions merely spatially overlap, at least partially."** _

  
Margo couldn't remember the last time she slept, her head pounding from lack of sleep. Too much caffeine, and not-quite crying. Alice was gone, niffin’d out with too much power from a spell that Margo had convinced her to do. Julia had been captured by The Beast when the went to pull Victoria out of the dungeon. Eliot was in the wind with an injured Quentin, until Margo could figure out a plan that didn't involve Q’s life for everyone’s else. “Selfish bastard,” she thought, even though she would do the same if it were Alice.

Her heart ached for whatever the hell she and Alice had been. The younger girl had never allowed her guard down enough for Margo to take a chance, but there had been moments. Everyone had been intimidated of the brilliant first year who didn’t even seem to know her own magic. Even the over-confident Julia, who took to Brakebills like a fish in water reeked with envy when Alice did a magic trick. Margo wasn't a person who got envious. She knew where her talents laid and how to use them. Alice made her curious, not jealous. She befriended the shy girl almost against her will, watching her awkward courtship with Quentin, and making sure she was a solid shoulder to lean on.

Margo could have pushed for more and usually she did, but she was no one's second choice. Besides Quentin was her friend -- one of her best friends, in fact, and he wouldn't forgive her for that. Their Alice was gone now and Quentin was in hiding with one less arm so Margo wasn't sure what she had really saved them from. It was just her and Penny now; their joke of a squad left to defend what was left of their little family. She now knew about the time loops, and Quentin had told them about Jane Chatwins little experiment. She couldn't believe she had lived and died through this shit thirty-three times.

She laughed bitterly and threw back a shot along with some of Penny’s adderall. She was waiting on him at the Physical Kids cottage to come back with Victoria and Josh, using whatever bargaining chips he needed, too. They were down a couple of team members and could use the extra help or sacrifice if need be.

“You think you should be drinking,” she heard Penny say rhetorically behind her.

She turned shrugging, seeing that he had an unconscious Josh and Victoria with him. Her brows raised up to question him, as she took in his cut lip and bloody eye.

“The fuck?,” she asked.

Penny dropped both Victoria and Josh harshly on the carpet and shook his head walking over to the bar. He grabbed the bottle of vodka and took a liberal chug from it.

“They're here, aren't they?,” he said waving the bottle back and forth between the slumped figures on the floor. “They”ll fight The Beast to save their own necks once we are in front of him.”

Margo once again shrugged, deciding it was a win against all the bullshit they were up against. She took another shot, and rolled her shoulders as she wished that Eliot was there.

“Well, he isn't,” said Penny, using her weakened mental state to break through her walls. “He fucked off with nerd boy as soon as he had an out, the motherfucker is a cowar-”

“He’s a survivor,” Margo interrupted him sharply. “Times like these you have to be. If it was Julia, you would do the same.”

They were quiet as they drank more, lost in thought but thankful to not be alone. Penny rubbed his hands across his face and sat the now-empty bottle down. It was time to go whether they wanted to or not.

“Let's get out of here before these assholes wake up,” Margo said as she grabbed her backpack, making sure her gun was still packed in it. Who said you couldn't have magic and semi-automatic weapons?

As they finished packing, tying Victoria and Josh’s hands to theirs, Penny gave Margo’s grip a tighter squeeze than usual. She looked up into his brown eyes and felt like crying all over again. She knew deep down in her soul that without Eliot and Quentin -- that without Alice, she wasn't coming back from the fight.

She felt the first hot, built-up tear slide down her face as she told Penny, “Sorry about your girl.”

Penny turned away from her, but she saw the tears fall from the other side of his face. “Sorry about yours, too.”

 

 

 

 

__

__

_**consciousness conceived as complex matrices**_  
_**patterns contained within patterns.**_  
_**magnetic anomaly brainwave synchronization**_  
_**unrecognized vortex activity locations.**_  
_**correlation amplification phenomena resonance.**_  
_**measurable parameter brain wave activity**_  
_**highly sensitive field fluctuations.**_  
_**transducer low frequency geomagnetic pulsations**_  
_**electromagnetic patterns: their associated chemical changes.**_  
_**Weak intensity complex magnetic fields**_  
_**generated earth hum technology affect**_  
_**flux-gate sample collapsing fields**_  
_**amplifier filter stages couples into analog digital converter.**_  
_**experiments correlating local geophysical anomalies**_  
_**earth's magnetic field changes consciousness.**_  
_**single electromagnetic coupling mechanism**_  
_**including spin-mediated neurons.**_  
_**upsurge solar activity alters brain rhythms, hormonal levels**_  
_**healing nature mystic experiences**_  
_**anomalous cognition -physical phenomena.**_  
_**internal model reality - subjective consciousness**_  
_**addition computational capacity**_  
_**existential status may need exotic physics**_  
_**quantum entanglement and new forms of physical interaction**_  
_**magnetic sensory cells induced meditative states**_  
_**direct correlation shifts magnetic flux.**_  
_**No active effort required.**_  
_**Magnetic mineral aligned crystal chains**_  
_**embedded biological membranes.**_  
_**atomic sublattices of ferrimagnetic material**_  
_**plausible theoretical mechanisms**_  
_**mechanosensitive membrane ion gates**_  
_**specific synergetic properties for transduction.**_  
_**cuboctahedral morphology properties**_  
_**jitterbugging vector equilibrium matrix basis tensegrity.**_  
_**basic geometrical biological building blocks.**_  
_**mystical red rock temples**_  
_**Tracing disjunctive dislocations**_  
_**Mother Earth speaks**_  
_**Questions remain.**_  
-Dan Filcek Apr 2015

  
Quentin walked around to the the backyard of the cottage where he could hear Margo and Eliot’s voices. He sighed deeply in relief when he caught sight of the two older students remembering Eliot’s word’s right before he went to see the “specialist” that was going to wipe his mind.

“If you get out of this somehow, come find Margo and I,” he told him placing a warm broad hand on Quentin’s face. “She likes to have barbecues in the rain, and makes all second-years drink till they pass out on the lawn.”

Eliot had slid his hand down to Quentin neck and held it there for longer than was normal of a new friend, but Quentin didn't mind. He was excited that Margo and Eliot had taken special interest in him for no other reason than he was a ‘high-strung super-nerd.’ Their causal touches and insistence that he attend their parties almost from the start seemed to almost surprise the duo, but they easily fell into a routine. He wished that Alice would take up their offer of friendship. It didn't feel right to hang out with them without her or vice versa.

When the woman Jane had given him another chance to be at Brakebills, he grabbed his bags and ran straight towards the Physical Kids cottage, feeling like the powers that be could change their mind at any time. He was wet from the rain and out of breath when he reached them. Margo was under an umbrella, probably too drunk to perform a rain protection spell, but still poised and beautiful. Eliot was manning the grill, conducting a fire starting spell, his gestures elegant and fluid even though he most likely had more to drink than Margo. Of course there wasn't a single drop of rain on him. “Quentin!,” they both yelled, excited to see their favorite first year. “We are so drunk,” Margo told him handing him a drink. “And hungry! We waited for you,” she pouted. Eliot started putting burgers on the grill making sure to ask as nonchalantly as possible, “Everything okay?”

Quentin just took a long sip of his drink, knowing by now that this was just how it was with them. The perfect mix of care and shit-talking. Quentin took it in stride because he knew that not only was this their way of saying, ‘We like you,’ but their way of asking, ‘Do you like us?’ And Quentin did, with every atom of his being.

With Julia and James he was never sure if he was in on the joke or if he was the joke. He loved Julia with the kinda love you felt for all childhood crushes, untouchable and unreachable. Perhaps that was just loving Julia. With Margo and Eliot, he knew when he was the joke and that was okay, because at least it was transparent. They wanted him around not just because they had always know each other or because they had been thrown in the same AP classes over the years, only just because he was Quentin.

“Sorry, guys,” he said smiling softly at them from under his hair.  
Margo grabbed his wrist dragging him down to sit next to her. “Oh, god, you sad sack, buck the fuck up!”, she jarred at him with a wide smile.

The food was now done, and Quentin’s stomach growled realizing that he hadn't eaten all day. Eliot slid two plates over and onto the table where Quentin and Margo were sitting, absentmindedly kissing the tops of their heads as he set with them.

“Dig in, kids, Daddy really out did himself with this one,” Eliot said as he poured them more wine.

Margo scrunched up her face and said “Gross,” but took a bite anyways, chewing happily through a smile.

Quentin ate and drank, laughing well into the night. He had the rare feeling that he was exactly where he was supposed to be at exactly the right time. He felt like they had all the time in the world. He felt infinite.

**Author's Note:**

> Would love to hear how everyone feels about this story or you're own personal head cannons involving past time lines.


End file.
